One for the road...

Intentionally incarnational...

Question: what do muslims, satanists, pagans, atheists and conservative evengelical women and Jesus all have in common? 

It may have something to do with the term 'intentionally incarnational' so whilst you ponder let me unpack those terms further:

intentional -  done with intention or on purpose; intended...

incarnation - the event of God revealed into/inhabiting the world through Jesus who was both fully God/fully human.

In that sense Jesus was intentionally incarnational - he inhabited a particular time, culture, context and country.   It was in this deliberate chosen time/setting/place that he revealed God -

No longer seeing the words for the trees...

Well I am all edited out so have sent off my submission for the magazine piece on emerging church and my faith journey - for final copy (with fuller footnotes) see here.

In doing my footnotes I came across this similar alternative journey complete with funky face pictures- although perhaps it has more of a sunset happy ending?! :)

The wish of God...

I don't often rave about sermons but sometimes it's like standing in front of a God highspeed bullet train, there's now way to resist...  Jason Clark has done an outstanding trilogy  quintology of talks on the Kingdom of God (click the link to down load MP3 file)  on: six exchanges of the Kingdom; into the Kingdom; signs of the Kingdom;   Kingdom mission; and Kingdom giving. HT to Jase.

One of the things that struck me was Jason's explanation of the route of the word 'will' in the Lord's prayer "your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven."  Jason explained that the route of the word is more like our word 'wish' i.e. the wish of God, the dream of God the longing of God to come and be done.  It reminded me of how God has a wish, a dream for the...

"We're asking President Bush, Primeminister Blair and all the world leaders to do something extraordinary, not put a man on the moon more like put mankind back on earth..." Bono

We don't need your money, just a few seconds of your time... 

If you're from the USA visit the One campaign and sign the declaration

If you're from the UK :

1. please vist the drop the debt campaign and send an email to Chancellor Brown asking him to cut the strings of debt - all you need to do is complete your details and hit submit
2. Now you are on a roll please  go and vote for trade justice as well - just compete the on-line voting form
3. keep yourself informed:t make povery history

Thank you.

Christian cultural accomadation...sell out or sold out?

I've done another guest spot at Jason Clark's blog entitled Living in sin/living in love: the both/and reality of cultural accommodating Christians?  Here's a taster for you:

"We live in a world full of shades of grey where these good/bad characteristics will be interwined. I can also see how christian culture could be bad in the same sense that the culture of the world can be bad (e.g. the hurt men have caused women through blame and opression), even if it is dressed up in more holy sounding clothes. Conversely I can also see how sometimes the culture of the world can/will have good values/norms/institutions/artifacts (closer to God’s heart/dream/longing) than those found in most churches, e.g. equality between men and women or environmantal compassion and justice. In that case ought my response be one of accomodating with the world - or at least going back to bibleview to see whether that has become too constrained and here is God using the world to beckon me on into being part of God’s dream for the world"

A request for help...

In response to this post on which of the four identified types of God people might believe in (that's if you believe in God), we've received this request for help from Andy:

"We're discussing this over here and I thought I'd ask the residents over here to come and give us a hand. In particular, is there anyone who used to believe in a distant God, who's moved to believing in a more invloved one? If so, how did you make the move?"

What you're still here,  you're missing out on a great conversation...

A consuming matrix?

First a Matrix reminder from those Muppets

Second, Gary in an excellent comment on the consumerism post said:

"Over at Prodigal Kiwi is a great article on the Matrix film and spiritual direction, taking as its main theme the idea of waking up to face reality and not the illusion. The more we wake up the more we notice the way our illusion is construcuted and this ties into the illusion of theocapitlaism, we wakw up to he fact that I can have more of my needs/ desires met while people in Kenya's slums cannot afford a nutritious meal. I wake up to the fact of how darn selfish I am and have to face the reality of my own woundedness. So what does that have to say about our discipleship and being mission orientated? I wake up and notice and move to reach out in love. Stimulating thoughts and midnight musings..."

Hmmm I hear you bro - anyone have any thoughts for Gary, and me?

"Consumerism...the triumphant winner of the ideological wars of the 20th century..."

Jason Clark has argued that consumerism has become the new religous zeitgeist, or as he puts it:

"...non/pre christians aren’t neutral to the Gospel, they are entrenched in a religious system as totalising as Islam or any other religion. Indeed Theocapitalism offers a way of life, that scorns any alternative. To see people come to faith in Jesus, and his mission through the church to the world, is not to make church more relevant, but to offer a new religion."

The title of this post comes from this fascinating Washington Post article: Acquiring Minds - inside America's all consuming passion which echos/supports/underpins Jason's thesis, to quote from the article:

"Consumerism was the triumphant winner of the ideological wars of the 20th century, beating out both religion and politics as the path millions of Americans follow to find purpose, meaning, order and transcendent exaltation in their lives...

The outside(r) track...

In a spirit of modelling honest self criticsim Jason Clark asks is Christianity irrededemly sexist - it is a post that makes me want to apologise for all the harm and hurt that men have caused.  More than that thought it brings me to the point of how can we move on together, how can we live a life that is not only maked with repentence/rethinking but where we are  reconciled, outsiders reclaimed and remade by THE redeemer par excellence. 

"Who needs a doctor: the healthy or the sick? I'm here inviting outsiders, not insiders—an invitation to a changed life, changed inside and out."  Jesus

It strikes me that God is passionate about outsiders, he is the God of the misfits and marginalised.  It would seem that christianity is not so much getting onto the insider track but an invitation to follow Jesus on to the outsider track, to leave comfort zones, to extend love to the unlovely, to reach out to the unreachable and to realise that we are doing with Christ...    

Of elephants, God and gap theology

I posted here about a recent religious research report by Bayler Uni which showed that americans believed in 1 of 4 types of God (based on how judgemental/involved participants viewed God) - of course there is a limition that God is only being viewed on this axis - change the labels on the axis and I'm sure we'd keep getting multiple views of God. 

As I said in the comments I do wonder about viewing God in terms of this is my God, this is your God and how we fracture the stainglass into shards of colour/shape/thickness to describe our own individual experience/encounter. I can see why we do but i wonder if we can view God other than through the lense of me the individual? It reminded me...